Even in 2017, email can be considered the circulatory system in the body of your business. While other communication tools such as SMS, instant messaging, Slack and CoSchedule often augment a company’s communication strategy, email remains the solid core of business correspondence.
Yet for many companies, while they may put lots of thought and invest lots of money into the software with which they run other areas of their business, email software is something of an afterthought. Either you go with the first free email service you try, or you pay to use one of the regular business-oriented packages without much consideration.
Now, Google is not a perfect company by any means, and there are lots of good reasons for being hesitant about over-relying on their products. But as far as email goes, Gmail and their paid-for professional email service G Suite can be considered among industry leaders for what they can do for your business. It is one area where the might of Google Corp. can be seen as a huge advantage for their product’s users.
For example, you can rely on Google’s servers to keep running 99.987% of the time. These aren’t cowboys with a get-rich-quick idea – they’re in it for the long run, and they’ve got the infrastructure to back them up. This also means they know a thing or two about security. Your Gmail emails will be encrypted in transit, and held on secure servers, so you know your data is safe.
Google is known primarily as a search engine, and for trying to make a back up of the entire world and its knowledge (through innovations such as Google Map, Earth, and Books), so you can be sure that data will be easy to find when you need it. Gmail pioneered threaded messages, which is great for having a conversation but not always so handy when you need to get to a certain piece of information, fast. But Google’s search power, in addition to Gmail’s carefully designed advanced search options, make for a speedy recovery of whatever it is you seek.
If you decide to go for the full professional G Suite – and, from $5 a month to subscribe, any serious business using Gmail should do – you get a range of professional features that will wipe away any doubt you have that Gmail can be a serious business tool.
Google Vault, for example, archives your time-sensitive data so it that it is retrievable beyond standard retention periods. This could be a real life-saver should you face a lawsuit or audit. You also get 24/7 tech support of the highest quality, which means you never need leave your customers hanging.
So Gmail has the business engine going on, but on a more cosmetic note, G Suite also has some great options for giving your email a professional look. When you set up your pro account, it is obligatory to let Google know your company’s URL (you do have a URL, right?) and it is straightforward to set up email addresses that make use of this domain (i.e. susan@susansbusiness.com rather than susanbusiness@gmail.com).
Furthermore, you can actually replace the Google logo in-house with your own, by adding it to the software so that each of your employees (and visiting customers) see your logo instead of Gmail’s in the corner of your screen.
And smooth integration with Google’s other tools such as Calendar, Hangouts, and Docs, make it a particularly smart choice if you’re trying to keep things consistent and usable, or to run your business ‘on the go’, moving from place to place and working off your laptop and the Cloud.
So give this visual summary of Gmail’s business power by Cloudmigrator five minutes of your time, and think again about which email service you’re using to keep your company agile. Picking the right email service could be the most important business decision you forgot to make.
About the author: Marilyn Vinch is a freelance writer and a digital nomad currently based in London, England. Her background is in human resources but over the years she’s grown to enjoy reading (and writing!) about topics connected to leadership, personal development, productivity and work/life balance.
